There is yet another new survey of millennials out. Like previous ones, this one shows that — surprise! — young people tend to be liberal.

This was also true of previous generations, spawning the saying that “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.” That saying has been attributed to some old white guy most millennials probably haven’t heard of, thanks to our pitiful schools and universities. All that guy did was save Western civilization, which is demonized these days in those same pitiful schools.

The new survey was conducted by Harstad Strategic Research, Inc. They work for Democrats. Their survey of millennials found that most millennials like lots and lots of government.

That’s a depressing set of graphs, as I’ll explain on the next page.

The overriding message of those graphs is that the left’s propaganda is working on the young. The rich already pay more than their fair share in taxes, yet millennials want them to pay more. Progs have been demonizing the rich for years, and it’s paying off for them. Progs never speak of trade-offs. There are always trade-offs. A policy that sounds good, such as “protecting the environment,” can and often does mean hurting the economy, raising taxes, and building new gold-plated government bureaucracies empowered to build up their own militarized police forces and pick away at your privacy. Forcing the rich to pay more in taxes will probably result in the rich investing less in the economy, which kills jobs.

Most of the questions answered in the graphs have to do with government activism, and millennials tend to want more and more of that, according to the Harstad research.

It’s a pity that the millennials are seldom shown the consequences of all that government activism.

One of those consequences is a loss of personal freedom. The more power you give to government, the more power you take away from yourself and your own generation. The more power you send to Washington, the less power you keep in your neighborhood, your city and your state. Once you give power away, it’s very very hard to get it back.

Another consequence is a loss of your own money, supposing that you have any. The progressive worldview sounds good until you ask one question: “Who is paying for all of this?”

Millennials will find out that they are paying for it, eventually. They are paying for the excesses of academia right now, with its overpaid deans and arrogant tenured professors who haven’t set foot in the real world since the Carter administration, in those expensive student loans in useless disciplines that they can’t pay off. They are paying for excessive government power right now, in the form of those jobs that Obamacare is killing, and those jobs that are being strangled to death by high taxes and energy prices, jobs that are now not available to millennials. Raising the minimum wage will only make entry-level jobs more scarce.

In the long term, millennials will end up paying for the unaffordable and unsustainable largess that government activist hero Barack Obama and his merry band of generational thieves are racking up right now. His generosity with other people’s money today is a bill that millennials will be stuck with tomorrow.

Maybe by the age of 40, after a couple decades of terrible stagnation, millennials will see the shine wear off the progressive pipe dream.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

They're ok with having a 'moral obligation to protect future generations from climate change', but overlook that they're saddling future generations with tons of debt, and a crappy economy, for their fantastic failures in social engineering.

"Maybe by the age of 40, after a couple decades of terrible stagnation, millennials will see the shine wear off the progressive pipe dream." By that time, it will be too late. Vaclav Klaus said (I am paraphrasing) he could understand Obama, but he could not understand the electorate, and that such electorate does not bode well for the future of America.

Maybe by the age of 40, after a couple decades of terrible stagnation, millennials will see the shine wear off the progressive pipe dream.

I fully expect that a large percentage of our millennials will wake up in a few years. Unfortunately, that's not much of a comfort because the generation after them will be at least as brain-washed as they were. In fact, they'll probably be worse given that the indoctrination seems to be more and more skewed to the left every day.

We need to revise how the education system works, particularly the values it champions, before we can hope for any broad and lasting change in the attitudes of our young. I don't see that happening unless we can somehow manage to alter the curricula or re-educate the teachers.

I think one very good move we could make is to insist that all teachers at every level have at least two years experience working in either the private sector or in the military. (Twenty years would be better but not very realistic.) I strongly suspect that most of the teachers - and those who write the text books and curricula - have NEVER served in the military or worked in the private sector and have very negative attitudes toward both. If the teachers all had just a little bit of experience with the real world, I think we'd see some far better attitudes being taught.

These spoiled children don't care about liberty. Mommy and daddy havebeen footing the bills all along so what do they care about futurefinancial responsibility? The future doesn't matter to them, moreimportant is what they can get now for themselves and in Obamathey have the perfect mentor.

Proggie view: "Government should help me more (by taking money from someone else's pocket or forcing someone else to do something for me), and government should let me do whatever I want, whenever I want."

Progs think government should be like indulgent parents with unlimited wealth and a hands-off approach to discipline.

The left is really good at demogoguing these issues. They are good at marketing their brand, and the media plays along. Having met some so-called journalists, I realize that most of them can't think and their educations are sorely lacking in subjects like economics, accounting, history, science - well, everything other than writing and leftist propaganda.

I would love to see a survey like this conclude with questions about "How much of YOUR money would you be willing to contribute to make sure these programs are successful?" Then go 90%, 80%, etc, until they give you a number. I guarantee, the Millennials all think that somebody else (Dad) will be paying for this.

I know some Baby Boomers who are still stupid enough to vote for this junk, who really believe that "the rich" are just "people who have more money than THEY do." I was debating a fairly successful lawyer one night who was arguing that "the rich" should have an effective tax rate of 80%. I asked him to define "rich." He said anyone who makes $500,000 per year. I asked him if he makes over $500k. Of course not!!! He wants anyone who makes more than he does to pick up the tab for this nonsense.

I do have some hope though. I know a Millennial male who has been a global warming, er, climate change nut since he was first indoctrinated in elementary school. For the last few years whenever he complains that the weather is NOT what the forecast said it would be, I point out that the very same people who can't tell you with any degree of accuracy whether it will rain in Atlanta TOMORROW, seem to think they can predict the weather for the entire world in 30 years. He used to argue with me that the global "climate change" predictions are based on computer models that are extremely accurate. Then during hurricane season I showed him a website that had about 15 different computer models predicting where the hurricane would make landfall. These very same weather weenies who were dithering about which models were historically the most accurate are the guys who bought into the hockey stick model heart and soul. I wasn't sure my Millennial was listening, but the other day I heard him say that you can design a computer model to predict pretty much anything you want it to. He was dissing the hockey stick!!!

When I was young, some of these questions would have been nearly incomprehensible. The ideas themselves were not espoused generally by parents, schools or the media. I was in college before I was exposed to socialism. By that time, I was immunized.

When young adults are no longer able to act like young adults...getting married, having children in wedlock, holding jobs during the early lean years...they remain adolescents and display typically adolescent attitudes like worrying about climate change rather than what they SHOULD be focusing on...like making the rent and getting the baby to the pediatrician.

I tremble at how harsh a transition awaits these self-entitled arrested adolescents when they enter the working world and learn that they have been systematically lied to.

I'd like to believe that is true but I'm not so sure. Obama, Kerry, the Clintons, Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder, and the rest of Obama's stooges and czars are all over 40 but none of them appear to be remotely conservative. Even if they're the ONLY people their age to believe what they do, the fact is they're still in power and they're still messing things up. Badly.

And frankly, I can't believe they are the only radicals in their age group. A whole lot of people voted for Obama and then re-elected him in the face of miserable track record during his first term. I'm sure many of those voters were simply fooled into voting for him but there must be a lot of true believers that voted for him too.

Well, all the kids believe this because they are taught it in the schools and universities, but fortunately the Republican party made the decision in the 60's and 70's that we had the churches so we didn't need all that secular humanism and monkey science...it is going to take a long time to dig out from our short sighted, anti-intellectual surrender of academia.

Knocking millenials shouldn't be the point. They aren't much different than the generations that preceded them (other than that so many believe they are so far above average without any evidence whatsoever....but that's the Left's fault, not the millenials')

The point should be that the criminals on the left have succeeded so dramatically in exploiting the millennials, along with minorities, homosexuals, women, unions and so many other groups.

Yet responsible and thoughtful adults (let's call them "conservatives" for grins) continue trying (hoping?) to persuade people to follow the path of the greater good, while the Left merrily throws our money at them.

I don't think that even Reagan could win in this environment. We need a whole new set of tactics to persuade 25 year-old children to forsake drugs, free lunches and sex without consequences in return for better lives 5 to 20 years down the road.

It won't be easy, and I don't have the foggiest notion how to reverse a 50-year old con game, but the current approach isn't working at all.

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